FLAGLER/PALM COAST NEWS-TRIBUNE
Palm Coast, Florida
Saturday, April 5, 2008
BODY FOUND ID TEEN MISSING FOR 13 YEARS
By Heather Scofield and Seth Robbins, Staff Writers
One year ago, Detective Lee Rossman of the Olmsted County Sheriff's Office in Minnesota received a call from Kristine Schmoll, asking him to look into her sister's disappearance 13 years earlier.
Now, after more than a decade spent missing important moments, hugs, holidays and smiles with her sister, Kristine Schmoll and her family have begun "the healing process," according to a letter to the media Wednesday.
Sadly, Kristine Schmoll's sister wasn't found alive. Instead Heather Ann Schmoll was found in an unmarked plot at Espanola Cemetery in Flagler County that until last week was assigned to "Jane Doe."
"I don't know if I would call it a success," Rossman said. "We obtained' our, goal of finding her and finished the case. But it's not the result we wanted. It's kind of a bittersweet feeling."
The Flagler Sheriff's Office has ruled the case "noncriminal" according to a news release, and the case has been closed.
The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as "undeter mined" with cocaine intoxication being a possible contributing cause. But a memo sent to the medical examiner from Leo Serrano, the then director of toxicology at Wuesthoff' Hospital in Rockledge, said a review of Schmoll's toxicology results showed the findings "would be consistent with acute cocaine intoxication as the cause of death."
When she came to him for help, Kristine Schmoll told Rossman she was 11 and it was the summer of 1993 when 17-year-old Heather Ann, drove away from their home in Stewartville, Minn. She headed south in her father's two-tone yellow Zephyr, eventually abandoning the car in Daytona Beach.
Heather Ann's best friend last spoke with her on New Year's Day in 1994. The friend said she had gone to Florida with her boyfriend, but he was abusive and trying to use her to make money for drugs. The friend's mother wired money for a bus ticket home, but Heather Ann Schmoll was never heard from again.
"It's been really difficult," Kristine Schmoll said, in a previous interview about her sister's disappearance, "I've held back a lot of tears and I think about her constantly. The frustrating part is as the years go past, you start to forget things. Every day a piece of her disappears."
Just a month after Heather Ann spoke with her best friend, a young girl turned up dead, face down in a field, along U.S. 1 near County Road 200 in Flagler, County, according to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office. But with no identification and no matching descriptions associated with a missing person report to connect the dots for investigators then, the young woman's story and name remained a mystery.
The little information investigators had was put into crime information database, where It would sit idle until the woman's sister contacted investigators last year.
Kristine Schmoll said her sister had short blonde hair, blue eyes and the word "love" tattooed across her left forearm, along with the name "Cody" inscribed on her right hand. It was those tattoos that would eventually help Flagler sheriff’s Lt. Bob Weber identify Heather Ann Schmoll as the girl buried in Espanola. DNA testing confirmed her identity.
The death certificate has now been changed to bear the proper name, according to the Medical Examiner's Office. And Heather Ann's loved ones hope to bring her body back home to "the family that loves her," they wrote in a letter to the media.
In an interview Wednesday, Weber said the original two investigators who worked the case of the Jane Doe found in the Flagler field Feb. 2, 1994, said there were no disturbances or signs of foul play where she was found. And the identity or whereabouts of the boyfriend Heather Ann Schmoll was suspected to be with is unknown" Weber said.
"There's nothing to investigate at this point," he said.
According to the autopsy report, Heather Ann Schmoll was dressed in a sweater with jogging pants and wore two multicolored fabric wrist bands on her left wrist when her body was found. And the report finds no bruises or other marks that might indicate a struggle occurred, Weber said.
"The journey to bring her home is just the beginning," the Schmoll family's letter states.
